It’s not confirmed, but an application to the Santa Monica Planning Commission for the parcel on 3rd Street near Santa Monica Boulevard (previously a Borders bookstore) appeared with renderings (above) that look unmistakably like an Apple Store.

In addition to the store’s proximity to the planned Expo station, here’s another clue that this Apple Store will be transit-oriented: the application mentions a $100/month transit subsidy and a $20/month bike subsidy for full time employees who get to work using transit alternatives.

The new store would only be two blocks from the current Apple Store on the Promenade, but that makes it two blocks closer to the future Expo Station. Apple has not been one to shy away from transit – in fact the company spent $4 million to renovate a Chicago subway station near one of their retail stores.

Considering this “Expo Line Extension” is not even going to GET to Santa Monica till 2015, its a bit presumptious of Apple to say they have a store “near” a light-rail station! Or even the city to advertise that as such!

Well John, Apple isn’t promoting it as such – it’s even still speculative that it will be an Apple Store (although all sings point to “yes”). But the combination of the location and promise of transit subsidies seems to point to, at the very least, an awareness of the future Expo station.

Any idea if Apple offers their employees at their current Promenade store the transit or bike subsidies? There are numerous bus lines that serve the area already–no need to wait for the Expo Line to reach Downtown Santa Monica!

Oh, by all means, Santa Monica should close the 5th Street offramp. Anything that adds to backups on the Santa Monica Freeway should be accomplished. The People’s Republic has already succeeded in creating daylong backups from Cloverfield all the way to Western Avenue, and by closing 5th Street, I-10 will be backed up all the way to Blythe! And the collateral damage to the 405 will be tremendous a swell! Yay, team!

And hence the gigantic problem with running at grade trains across Lincoln and 5th… Traffic at those intersections will still increase over the years even with all the expo ridership, they are going to find that grade separation will become necessary and that it should have been done from the get go. That’s not to say that expo won’t slow the growth of traffic, but the trains are still likely going to be delayed either because of a lack of signal preemption or gridlock or both (I really hope I am wrong on this).

I recall there being plans originally to have an elevated station at 4th/Colorado when that alignment was chosen. I remember seeing concept renderings of it. Or it at least was an alternative on the table. Either way that would have been great since the immediate area is not strictly residential and therefore would not have caused so many NIMBY concerns. But I guess the city of SM didn’t want that and opted for less efficient rail operations.

San Francisco survived the closing of the Embarcadero Freeway. There was all this gloom about the amount of traffic that was going to pile on the streets surrounding the freeway with its closure. It never materialized. Im not saying its the same case here but I have a feeling that with Expo in Colorado the inconvenienced car traffic will shift to other modes, such as bicycles and transit that intersection will not be as disastrous as our intuition my lead us to believe.